ABSTRACT Although responsive parenting is critical to child development, why it occurs and the processes that comprise it are poorly understood. This research will test a model of responsive parenting that emphasizes the emotions and emotional communication occurring during parent-child communication. The model details how maternal responsiveness is influenced by mothers' experience of particular emotions and their ability to understand the emotional communications of children. Mothers will play, feed and wait with their young children. From videotapes of these interactions, mothers' behavior will be coded for three aspects of responsiveness: sensitivity, intrusiveness and contingency. The data will be used to understand how responsive behavior is influenced by mothers' immediate emotions, the child behavior that elicits them, and the emotions mothers think their children are experiencing. The data will also be used to understand whether emotions are a principal reason why responsiveness is influenced by other, non-immediate variables, specifically by mothers' personalities, mothers' social relationships, and the temperaments of children. Do mothers' levels of empathy, depression, or marital conflict, for example, undermine mothers' responsiveness because these influence the emotions mothers feel when interacting with their children? This research will enable us to understand how emotions control the responsiveness of mothers' behavior, and how emotions determine the impact that life experiences and personality dispositions have on parenting behavior. This knowledge is critical to understanding human development in the first years of life and, in fact, to understanding ways that emotions promote and undermine interpersonal behavior generally.
